Baba Yaga

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Catgeory: gialli / In category: 4 of 10 / Overall: 25 of 100

Corrado Farina’s ‘Baba Yaga’ is one of those films I’d been vaguely aware of without knowing anything much about it. I came across it having fed “giallo” into the search facility while updating my rental list recently. But is it a giallo? The first time I ever wrote about gialli on this blog, I prefaced the review with a brief checklist: a guide to recognising your giallo. It tapped out at ten items:

1. Black gloves. The must-have fashion accessory for the killer-about-town.

2. An amateur sleuth, in the wrong place at the wrong time, who decides to launch their own investigation after witnessing a murder or attempted murder.

3. Totally ineffectual police officers.

4. Extended, operatic death scenes which present as a hybrid of the traditional whodunit and the visceral stalk ‘n’ slash flick.

5. Staircases, often spiral. Likewise, killers and victims alike tend to plunge from high places or down elevator shafts.

6. J&B. Product placement as blatant as Aston Martins in Bond movies.

7. Famous mainstream actors at the start or later on in their careers.

8. Gratuitous nudity. (Well, black gloves and bottles of J&B can only generate so many ticket sales.)

9. Edwige Fenech.

10. Distinctive titles, often featuring an animal (‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’), a colour (‘Deep Red’), a number (‘Five Dolls for an August Moon’), or sometimes a combination of all three (‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’).

Add to this an occasional tendency to incorporate supernatural elements, and let’s run ‘Baba Yaga’ against the checklist. It scores a big fat no on points 1, 5, 9 and 10. Point 2 is a maybe – the main character, adrift in a welter of weird shit, latches onto a hitherto overlooked detail (a quintessential giallo trope) which helps her unravel things. Likewise point 3 – some cops turn up at the end and do precisely fuck all, but their abortive attempts at sleuthing are never established in counterpoint to the amateur detective’s efforts as in the best gialli.

Point 4, half and half – there are some extended, operative (hell, positively grand guignol) dream sequences that presage a couple of swiftly portrayed, almost throwaway death scenes.

As for the rest of them: point 6 (didn’t notice, and the supremely authoritative Atrocity Nights J&B in the movies page doesn’t list ‘Baba Yaga’, so I’m guessing not); point 7 (check: Carroll Baker); and point 8 (very little nudity per se, but sleaze aplenty).

So it’s a very shallow case for ‘Baba Yaga’ as a giallo. But fuck it, it’s my blog and I’ve still got 75 movies to get through to finish this Operation 101010 project so I’m taking the minority view and deciding to allow it.

The film centres around photographer Valentina (Isabelle de Funes). When we first meet her she’s attending some kind of weird performance theatre piece in a graveyard. The police break it up and she adjourns to a society party. Later she hangs out with some sexy Marxists who talk up revolution. In the course of the film she gets involved with director Arno Treves (George Eastman); one moment he’s making a documentary attacking capitalists, the next he’s shooting a commercial for washing powder. The politics of ‘Baba Yaga’ are, to put it mildly, slightly confused.

Treves’s washing powder commercial, incidentally, is horribly racist. It anthropomorphosises a black man in a black suit as a stain and a white man in a white suit as the detergent. Whether Farina meant this ironically, I’m not sure. But it’s something of a slap in the face to the viewer. It doesn’t help, either, that an air of homophobia permeates ‘Baba Yaga’, in the shape of its eponymous anti-heroine.

Baba Yaga is a witch and a lesbian. Farina seems to have less of an issue with the whole witch aspect. Long story short: B.Y. almost runs Valentina over as she walks home from the society party, offers her a lift, and tells her they were destined to meet. She takes a clip from Valentina’s garter and promises to drop by to see her the next day. Valentina flees to her apartment where she has the first of several surreal dreams that, depending on how your look at it, (a) tap into her sexual repression, (b) feature fetishistic use of German uniforms (from both wars), (c) make no fucking sense, or (d) all of the above.

B.Y. comes calling, as promised, the next day and puts a spell on Valentina’s camera. Doing an erotic shoot with a model dressed in a revealing cowgirl outfit, the poor unfortunate collapses as if shot by the very replica pistol she’s holding.

Later, Valentina photographs a protestor at a demonstration and the guy drops dead. Valentina hits upon a self-evident solution: use a different camera. This doesn’t, however, stop her from visiting B.Y. on the pretext of using her decrepit old house as a backdrop to a photoshoot. B.Y. gives her a doll called Annette. The doll is done up in bondage gear.

At another erotic shoot, the model is stabbed during a power cut and later dies. Valentina and Treves develop the film from the possessed camera and the resultant pictures indicate that Annette (Ely Galleani) has come to life and offed said model.

(I am not making this up.)

Annette appears to Valentina, almost seduces her, then departs.

A phone call summons her to chez B.Y. Now completely under the witch’s spell, she goes. After ten minutes’ worth of kink (bondage, whipping and a quick grope), Treves turns up to save her from the proverbial fate worse than death.

Which is where I have issues with the film. Farina obviously revels in the faux sapphic imagery and yet comes across as puritanical in his denunciation of Baba Yaga as a manipulative and evil seductress. However, all of the dream sequences seem to indicate that Valentina is drawn to B.Y. I can’t help thinking that a more interesting (and certainly more erotic) film could have been wrought from the concept of Baba Yaga as Valentina’s liberator. Likewise, I’m also stumped as to why the supposedly omnipotent B.Y. wastes so much time and effort on the androgynous and unresponsive Valentina when she has the voluptuous and sexed-up Annette at her disposal. Without wishing to veer into the realms of chauvinism, laddishness and objectification, let me put it this way – Valentina or Annette, your choice:

Ahem. Moving swiftly on:

‘Baba Yaga’ is homophobic, racist and deeply confused in roughly equal measures. And it’s probably not even a giallo. The Shameless DVD release that I watched purports to be Farina’s final cut, restored from the butchering the erstwhile distributors enforced upon it. I’ve never seen said bastardised version, but if the director’s cut is this schizophrenic, I’d hate to imagine how fucked up the theatrical release was.

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Diane Lane in 'The Big Town'

Introducing a new series on The Agitation of the Mind: an early hours of Saturday night/Sunday morning celebration of all that's sultry, sensuous and seductive in cinema. And who better to start with than the incomparable Diane Lane in 'The Big Town'?

The Oxford Murders

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: impulse buys / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 24 of 100


Why buy?

It was £3.00 (about $4.85).

And?

I’d enjoyed Guillermo Martinez’s novel – a short, highly readable and cleverly constructed mystery.

And?

A good cast, including the voluptuously appealing Leonor Watling.

The expectation

A cerebral murder mystery enlivened by a darkly European aesthetic and some classy performances.

The actuality

On paper, this had real potential: an intellectual murder mystery predicated on logic puzzles and the question of whether an absolute truth can ever be established; a shoal of red herrings; a double-bluff finale; an appealing young American actor paired up with a heavyweight British thesp; and a director (Alex de la Iglesia) who’s proved himself in diverse genres (horror, comedy, drama) and can generally be relied on to bring a touch of the macabre to the proceedings.

The end product, though, is infuriating. Nothing quite gels. Whereas Elijah Wood turns in a thoughtful, often understated performance as Martin, an earnest young student hoping to gain the mentorship of respected academic Arthur Seldom (John Hurt), and Leonor Watling proves luscious and sparky as Lorna, the nurse he gets involved with, the other acting performances are all over the place.

John Hurt lightly seasons the scenery and proceeds to chew with relish. Jim Carter, sporting a Colonel Blimp style moustache, hams it up as a police inspector so dim-witted he makes your average giallo copper look like Sherlock Holmes. A bizarrely cast Dominique Pinon seems to be in another film entirely, Anna Massey veers into Mrs Rochester territory and Burn Gorman, as a fellow student in competition with Martin, plays all his scenes as if locked into a stare-it-out contest.

Then there’s the demented cameo by Alex Cox. Yes, that Alex Cox. His character is an obsessive researcher who stumbles on a pattern of answers to logic problems given by educationally substandard test subjects. Realising upon interviewing them that their decidedly left-of-centre reasoning demonstrates an internal logic equal to that of a conventional or even intellectually brilliant response, his determination to further his studies in this area – to unearth some new and radical perspective on the human mind – leads him to the company of the insane and irreparable damage to his own capacity for reason.

It’s a powerhouse sequence: Cox gives it his all, while de la Iglesia, for the first and only time in the movie, really cuts loose in terms of imagery, immediacy and intensity. The pisser is, it turns out to be one of an inordinate number of red herrings. Granted, red herrings are part and parcel of the traditional murder mystery, but here they’re packed in like, er, sardines. Often inelegantly. Example: a scene in which a police psychologist speculates that the murderer is a repressed homosexual cuts to a scene where a minor character, drunk and with a chip on his shoulder, starts shouting, “I’m going to come out of the closet and arse-fuck the lot of you.” Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Indeed, with the film’s reliance on many archetypes of the genre (something the novel uses well, because it riffs on the literary form of the whodunnit in a way that’s pretty much impossible to translate to film), its pretentions to intellectualism and the Oxford setting, it’s hard not to imagine the ghost of Inspector Morse floating around in the background. And once that thought’s in your head, it’s hard to shake the notion that watching an episode of ‘Morse’ would constitute two hours better spent.

Still, ‘The Oxford Murders’ emerges as reasonably entertaining, the lovely Leonor is easy on the eye and there’s a sting in the tale that ensures the dreaming spires don’t get too dreamy. It’s average enough that there’s nothing to get excited about, yet accomplished enough that a harsher review would be bad sportsmanship.

Good buy/bad buy?

There’s probably another viewing in it, but ultimately this should have been a rental, not a purchase.

HELLRAISERS: The Three Musketeers

In an embarrassing example of Well Known Film Facts Totally Passing Me By, I had no idea, when I added Richard Lester’s ‘The Three Musketeers’ to the rental list, that its sequel (the cunningly titled ‘Four Musketeers’) actually compromised the second part of Dumas’s novel instead of being the rushed-into-production quick cash-in that I’d assumed it was.

Turns out, too, that both films were shot at the same time – indeed, the cast thought they were just making one (fairly long) film. When producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind released the thing in two halves, to not inconsiderable box office, the main cast united in apposite “all for one, one for all” stylee and brought a court action against the filmmakers.

Watching ‘The Three Musketeers’ over the bank holiday weekend, I had the schizophrenic experience of finding the behind-the-scenes battle more interesting than any of the swordplay on offer (don’t get me wrong: it’s excitingly done and Oliver Reed, to use the vernacular, proper goes for it; there’s just too damn much – it’s swords drawn every five minutes or so and after the fifth or sixth bout a sense of repetition sets in) and yet, as the end credits – with their little teaser for ‘The Four Musketeers’ – rolled, I was cursing that I hadn’t added that title to the rental list while I was at it.

Schizophrenic is a good description of the film overall. Oliver Reed brings real gravitas to the role of Athos, likewise Christopher Lee to the role of Rochefort, yet the presence of comic stalwarts Roy Kinnear and Spike Milligan, coupled with Frank Finlay’s buffoonish portrayal of Porthos and a general tendency by Lester to play entire sequences as exercises in broad physical comedy, gives the film an air of ‘Carry On D’Artagnan’.

Speaking of D’Artagnan, the casting of Michael York (along with that of Richard Chamberlain as Aramis) turns half of the Musketeers into pretty boys, and while the shirtless York demonstrates a buffed-up muscularity, his screen presence is at odds to Reed’s brooding intensity.

Then again, the cast as a whole is something of a pick ‘n’ mix bag: where else would you find Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welsh, Charlton Heston, Joss Ackland, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Simon Ward, Geraldine Chaplin, ‘Likely Lads’ star Rodney Bewes and (I kid you not!) Sybil Danning rubbing shoulders in the same movie?

Perhaps the unlikeliest candidate emerges as most appealing: Raquel Welsh’s aptitude for deadpan comedy is priceless, her portrayal of Constance de Bonacieux as a coquettish clutz both satirises her sex symbol status and turns what could have been a mere set-dressing role into a scene-stealing success. Roy Kinnear, too, deserves a ‘man of the match’ award for two bits of inspired silliness: his attack on Rochefort with an uprooted sapling, and his twatting of a court guard while dressed as a bear.

The pacing is uneven – because of the high-end frequency of the sword fights, the moment the film pauses to deal with court intrigue or flesh out a character, inertia sets in – and some of the acting is just plain wooden, but for all the tomfoolery George Macdonald Fraser’s script retains a commendable fidelity to the novel and at 103 minutes it’s an entertaining timewaster that doesn’t waste too much of your time. Damned if I haven’t added the follow-up to my rental list.

Corin Redgrave

The first film I can remember seeing Corin Redgrave in is Richard Attenborough’s poignant debut 'Oh What a Lovely War'. In a production jam-packed with famous names – Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Jack Hawkins, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Maggie Smith, Susannah York, John Mills, Laurence Olivier, Kenneth More, Edward Fox – it’s Corin Redgrave’s heartbreaking performance as doomed innocent Bertie Smith that has stayed with me.

Corin Redgrave died yesterday aged 70. To his family, my condolences. To his memory, a glass is raised at chez Agitation.


i.m. Corin Redgrave, 16 July 1939 – 6 April 2010

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!

The poll closed earlier today and the gizmo that computes the percentages tells me that Jean-Pierre Jeunet is the people’s choice with 22 votes or 33%.

The runners-up are:

Tim Burton: 14 votes (21%)
Chan-wook Park: 13 votes (20%)
Neil Jordan: 11 votes (16%)
Alex de la Igelsia: 2 votes (3%)
F Gary Gray: 2 votes (3%)
Mira Nair: 1 vote (1%)

The Jeunet retrospective will kick-off in the summer.

March was a complete no-hoper with regards to the Personal Faves, Work Sucks and Hellraisers series. Things were a little better on the Operation 101010 front:

Clint Eastwood movies
None yet. The Agitation of the Mind will focus on Eastwood’s career during May, leading up to the icon’s 80th birthday.

Werner Herzog movies
1. Little Dieter Needs to Fly
2. Wings of Hope

Anime
1. My Neighbour Totoro
2. Sky Blue
3. Ponyo

Gialli
1. All the Colours of the Dark
2. Blood Stained Shadow
3. The Black Belly of the Tarantula

Documentaries
1. The Aristocrats
2. An Inconvenient Truth
3. Anvil: The Story of Anvil
4. Iron Maiden: Flight 666

Eurovisions
1. Amarcord
2. Winter Light
3. All About My Mother


Comedies
1. Intolerable Cruelty
2. Kissing Jessica Stein
3. In the Loop

Biopics
1. Sylvia

Impulse buys
1. Rise: Blood Hunter
2. Stoned

Films with numbers in the title
1. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
2. 49th Parallel

Finally, a small announcement:

I started this blog, as I started MovieBuff Redux on Platform 27 before it, as a fun thing to do in the gaps between undertaking proper writing projects (ie. chipping away at my lifetime’s ambition of making it as a novelist). With the exception of a failed attempt in late 2008/early 2009 to drag what was essentially a short story out to novel length, I’ve singularly failed to do any serious work towards this end.

Last month, as an early birthday present, my wife paid for me to attend a creative writing course at the Nottingham Contemporary, hoping it would kick-start my dormant ambitions. Good call on her part. I’ve completed two stories since the course finished mid last week, and I’m now fervently doing research and sketching out some preliminary material for what might (whisper it softly) become a novel. A friend of mine, a talented young artist, has expressed interest in working with me in developing a graphic novel version.

I’m not going to say anything more for fear of jinxing myself, but I need to do a hell of a lot of reading by way of research, then I want to apply myself fully to the project. I can’t maintain the current rate of blogging at the same time, but by the same chalk I don’t want to put The Agitation of the Mind on hold. I’ve invested too much of myself in it and built up a decent readership.

So I’m going to take a fortnight’s break, then re-approach the blog mid-April with the intention of posting at least one (and hopefully two) reviews per week. At this rate, I should still complete Operation 101010 by the end of the year, even if on/off projects like the Personal Faves or Hellraisers might have to take a back seat. (In the interests of new material for Agitation, if anyone would like to submit a guest article, I’d be happy to feature your work; email me: slainte at inbox dot com.)

Likewise, if my proliferation in leaving comments on other sites lapses over the coming months, please don’t think I’m being anti-social. I’ll still be reading your sites in whatever time there may be available when I ought to be working.

Stoned

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: impulse buys / In category: 2 of 10 / Overall: 23 of 100

Why buy?

It was about £5 ($7.50).

And?

It received decent notices during its (brief) theatrical run.

And?

The soundtrack was guaranteed to be a belter.


The expectation

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, baby! Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.


The actuality

To a degree, it delivers in all three areas.

Let’s take them one at a time:

There’s plenty of nudity and some fairly unsubtle intimations (for a 15-rated movie anyway) of BDSM, sexual violence, statutory rape, group sex and troilism. But for all of this, and despite the throat-tightening beauty of Tuva Novotny and Monet Mazur (both of whom are frequently half-naked if not wholly), there is little in the way of erotic frisson.

There’s plenty of drug use. Fuck’s sake, it’s a biopic of Brian Jones! And if this film and Stephen Davis’s Rolling Stones biog ‘Old Gods Almost Dead’ are anything to go by, the guy had a tendency to the kind of indulgences that make Keith Richards’s hoover-nosed habits look like a life of sobriety by comparison. Yet it never reaches the trippy heights or psychedelic mind-fuckery of Oliver Stone’s ‘The Doors’, Ken Russell’s ‘Tommy’ or Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell’s counter-culture anti-masterpiece ‘Performance’.

Rock ‘n’ roll? Hell, yeah. The Rolling Stones are represented by The Counterfeit Stones (doing a sterling job) and the soundtrack is rounded out with original cuts by Jefferson Airplane, Traffic, The Small Faces and The Bees.

The narrative focuses on the final days of Brian Jones (Leo Gregory), estranged from the Stones and whiling away his time at Cotchford Farm, his sprawling country retreat and formerly the home of children’s author A.A. Milne, as he waits for the inevitable expulsion from the band. (Jones was unable to participate in the Stones’ 1969 tour of America due to his drug convictions; moreover, his attendance at rehearsal/recording sessions had become more often than not characterised by incapacitation and inability to play.) He is attended by his latest girlfriend Anna Wohlin (Novotny) and loyal Stones chauffeur-cum-minder-cum-fixer Tom Keylock (David Morrissey). At Jones’s behest, Keylock engages local builder Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine) to do some renovation work around Cotchford Farm.

A culture clash ensues between the bullish, defiantly working-class Thorogood and the bohemian, flamboyant and sexually ambiguous Jones, the escalating tension steeped in sexual rivalry as Jones plays off the seductive Wohlin against Thorogood. Jones rubbishes the work of Thorogood and his team, calling for entire walls to be torn down before changing his mind and tasking the workmen with re-erecting them. Pay is promised then withheld, Thorogood taking his grievances to Keylock while Jones blithely shrugs off anything so piffling as monetary concerns.

And yet, somehow, a strange and increasingly unhealthy mutual dependency develops between Jones and Thorogood, events playing out at Cotchford Farm (as Jones heads inexorably towards a date with the swimming pool) in counterpoint to Jones’s recollections of the band’s history, his destructive and abusive relationship with Anita Pallenberg (Mazur) and her eventual cuckolding him with Keith Richards (Ben Wishaw).

There’s dramatic potential aplenty in all of this, but the film has two main problems (and a host of minor ones, but for the sake of brevity I’ll just stick to the biggies). The first is the absolute lack of a sympathetic, likeable or even remotely pleasant character. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some bludgeoning literal philistine who requires everything to be black and white and the good guys and the bad guys to wear hats of the requisite colour. I like to see a bristlingly nasty villain, a morally compromised anti-hero or a vituperatively cynical bastard in the lead role as much as the next man. But I also get the most out of a film or novel if I can identify, root for or moderately give a shit about at least one of the characters. ‘Stoned’ gives us Jones, a woman-beater and possibly a rapist; Thorogood, a human incendiary device with a hair-trigger; Keylock, a leech who exploits his access to the Stones’ inner sanctum in order to shag groupies; Wohlin, an alternately clingy and indifferent bit of set decoration; and Pallenberg, whom the filmmakers portray as complicit in Jones mistreatment of her. Indeed, the depiction of Wohlin and Pallenberg adds a tinge of misogyny to an already seedy and black-hearted aesthetic.

The second is Stephen Wolley’s directorial approach. In the flashback sequences, he achieves an off-kilter aesthetic that evokes (sometimes through explicit plagiarism) ‘The Servant’ and ‘Performance’, both of which deal with unhealthy co-dependent relationships, power games and troilism. However, in the Cotchford Farm scenes, ie. those which define the film’s dynamic and as such could (should?) be expected to engage with the aforementioned psychosexual tropes, he seems ill at ease: the visuals are bland, the pacing uneven, the sexual tension wanting in comparison to the scenes between Jones and Pallenberg. The result is an inconsistency the film is unable to reconcile.

And yet … and yet …

‘Stoned’ is never less than watchable. The performances are searing. Paddy Considine mines a jet-black seam of intensity and coiled violence that matches his unforgettable turn in Shane Meadows’s ‘A Room for Romeo Brass’. Leo Gregory turns up the predatorial charisma, magnetism and sexual androgyny to the max. David Morrissey exudes dodgy-dudeness from every pore. Novotny and Mazur rise above the thanklessness of their roles.

Good buy/bad buy?

I’m still undecided. There are significant problems and the film, in the final analysis, leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. But performances and soundtrack are excellent. It’s too flawed to merit a recommendation, yet it contains enough that’s commendable to disallow a perfunctory writing off

Fuck it: the Scottish verdict.